Principal Engineer

Closing date for applications: 10/08/2026

Location London, United Kingdom

Job typePermanent | Contract typeFull Time

Mostly Remote

You’ll spend most of your time at home, working with your team digitally. You’ll come into an office or hub at least twice a month to collaborate with your colleagues.

Managerial / Technical Lead

This is a general indication and doesn’t always reflect day-to-day responsibilities. Check the job description for full details.

#R-00282906

Join our digital revolution in NatWest Digital X

In everything we do, we work to one aim. To make digital experiences which are effortless and secure.

So we organise ourselves around three principles: engineer, protect, and operate. We engineer simple solutions, we protect our customers, and we operate smarter.

Job description

This role is based in the United Kingdom and as such all normal working days must be carried out in the United Kingdom.

Join us as a Principal Engineer

This is a challenging role that will see you design and engineer software with the customer or user experience as the primary objective

With your software development background, you’ll be working with architects to help define major components of the business-wide target architecture and roadmap

You’ll gain valuable senior stakeholder exposure as well as the opportunity to hone your technical talents and leadership skills

What you'll do

As a Principal Engineer in the Engineering Platforms team, you’ll be delivering modern software development tools chain for engineers across the bank, protecting them from the complexities of developing and delivering applications.

You’ll be leading the more significant, complex and technically challenging assignments, coordinating multiple feature teams, making sure that their technical journeys support realisation of the targets, and deliver the values of the relevant metrics published to our investors.

You’ll also be:

Defining, creating and providing oversight and governance of engineering and design solutions with a focus on end-to-end automation, simplification, resilience, security, performance, scalability and reusability

Driving reliability, automation, and scalability across our developer platforms, including GitLab, Artifactory and Ansible Automation Platform, with a user base of over 25,000 colleagues

Taking on a key role in building a world-class developer experience by ensuring our systems are robust, efficient, and easy to use

Defining and developing architecture models and roadmaps of application and software components to meet business and technical requirements, driving common usability across products and domains

Working closely with platform engineering teams, platform architects, and partners such as GitLab, Red Hat to shape our CI/CD strategy, observability stack, and automation frameworks

Providing expertise in Kubernetes, GitLab, ArgoCD/Flux, and cloud-native technologies to enhance our platform’s reliability and performance

The skills you'll need

You’ll come with significant experience in software engineering, software or database design and architecture, as well as experience of developing software within a DevOps and Agile framework.

Along with an expert understanding of the latest market trends, technologies and tools, you’ll bring significant and demonstrable experience of implementing programming best practice, especially around scalability, automation, virtualisation, optimisation, availability and performance.

You’ll also need:

A strong background in leading software development, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or platform engineering teams in a matrix structure, introducing and executing technical strategies

Significant and demonstrable experience of test-driven development, automated test frameworks, monitoring, observability, and automation practices

A background in designing or implementing APIs and highly available, resilient services

The ability to rapidly and effectively understand and translate product, business, operational and reliability requirements into technical solutions

A background working with code repositories, bug tracking tools, wikis and observability platforms

Your benefits breakdown

Here’s a quick look at what your pay package and annual leave could look like if you get accepted for the role. We have a wide range of benefits to support you in your working life and beyond.

Tap each segment for details.

Your pay package

100% Base pay This is your base pay package that you take home every month.

+10% Pension funding This is monthly funding paid towards your pension.

up to +10% Benefit funding This is monthly funding paid towards a range of benefits you can choose from.

Your leave allowance

30 days Annual leave You’ll also have the opportunity to purchase up to 5 additional days off.

3 days Volunteering Take time off to support the causes you’re passionate about.

3 days Training Take time to build the skills you need to grow your career.

Total rewards package

Welcome to our Bishopsgate hub

Based only a few minutes’ walk from Liverpool Street Station, the central location of this office makes working there incredibly convenient. Everything you need is close by, so you can run errands, go to the gym, and socialise with friends and colleagues before and after work.

Bishopsgate recently underwent a multi-year refurbishment programme to improve spaces and facilities as well as become more sustainable.

Our tech stack

Here’s just some of the technologies we use.

Front end

JavaScript

ReactJS

AngularJS

Back end

Python

Java

Microsoft Dynamics

DevOps

AWS

GitLab

Google Cloud Platform

Data

Kafka

Hadoop

PostgreSQL

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